Translucency has conventionally been known to serve as an indicator of the appearance of skin. Translucency has been determined by sensory evaluations which are conducted by a beauty technician visually, wherein an external skin preparation is applied to the skin as necessary.
However, in addition to requiring many years of experience in order to evaluate skin translucency accurately, even if skin translucency was evaluated by a technician having ample experience, it was difficult to completely eliminate variations between evaluations.
For example, a conventional method for evaluating skin translucency is known that is based on the total reflectance of two types of reflected light consisting of an S-polarized light component and a P-polarized light component obtained by irradiating P-polarized light to the surface of skin and receiving reflected light in the form of an S-polarized polarized light component, and irradiating S-polarized light to the surface of skin and receiving reflected light in the form of a P-polarized light component (see, for example, PLT 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-215991).
On the other hand, external skin preparations containing one or more an alkoxysalicylic acid and/or salt thereof are known as examples of external skin preparations having a skin whitening effect (see, for example, PLT 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. H6-40886).